Daniel Leech-Wilkinson

Trustee

Daniel Leech-Wilkinson gained his first degree from the Royal College of Music followed by postgraduate studies at King's College London and Clare College, Cambridge. As a musicologist he initially researched 14th-century French music (manuscripts, analysis, performance practice), before changing his focus, c. 2000, to the evidence of early recordings in relation to the practice and experience of performance expressivity. He led a project on 'Expressivity in Schubert Song Performance' within the AHRC Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM, 2004-9), followed by 'Shaping Music in Performance' for the Research Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice (2009-14). Books include The Modern Invention of Medieval Music (Cambridge, 2002), The Changing Sound of Music (London, 2009), and (with Helen Prior) Music and Shape (Oxford, 2018). His recent work questions foundational beliefs about ‘proper’ performance and offers musicians alternative approaches. He acted as Dramaturg for Helios Collective’s ‘Dido & Belinda’ (2016), a re-reading of Purcell’s ‘Dido & Aeneas’. He is currently writing an eBook, Challenging Performance: Classical Music Performance Norms and How to Escape Them, ongoing at https://challengingperformance.com/the-book/. He is Emeritus Professor of Music at King’s College London.